Tianna J-Williams

Less than five years ago, Tianna J-Williams was working as a midwife in a busy maternity ward delivering the newborn of Birmingham.

Then, in the summer of 2017, she went back to general nursing, but instead of caring for patients in hospital wards, Tianna visited people living at home with debilitating health and medical issues. Her employer was a private company contracted by the Department of Work and Pensions to reassess the health issues of people claiming living support benefits from the government. In their eyes they were not patients, but claimants.

It was a distinction that Tianna found hard to reconcile with her personal ethics and values. “These were people that had lived with a condition for a long time and they were being reassessed for whether they needed to continue having that money to help them live, or that they could scale that back to… basically make them go back to work. It broke me, that job.” By the end of the year Tianna had quit. Fortunately, the

midwife had managed to find a new calling, and today she is back helping Birmingham’s mums-to-be, not with delivering their babies, but by using her camera to honour their maternity…

Were you always interested in photography while you were working as a midwife?

I would always take pictures on my phone. Then, in 2015, I decided I wanted a camera because I wanted something whereby I could take them properly, so I went to Currys PC World and said I’m on a small budget and I just want to get a DSLR, what do you recommend? And he said, “There’s a really nice Nikon over there, a D3200, it comes with a 18-55mm kit lens, and